El Día de los Muertos
by Natsu
Summary: On the 2nd of November Kenny McCormick died and did not come back. Slash. K2.
1. Prologue

**El Día de los Muertos**

+ Natsu +

PROLOGUE

On the 2nd of November Kenny McCormick died and did not come back.

It had been a routine accident: A drunken slip from the edge of a balcony whilst dicking around climbing the railings. Three people had watched him plummet, heard the sick thud of limbs crumbling against snow-dusted concrete, and had then turned placidly back to their partying. Everyone knew about the boy who didn't die, so none of them were worried.

Stan stepped on one of Kenny's lifeless hands as he was stumbling backwards out the door, clutching at the curves of Wendy's body. His faculties were impaired by too much sambuca and he nearly lost it when he felt the knuckles roll beneath the inadequate sole of his sneaker. Still crushed against him, Wendy looked down at the ground and gave a little squeak of revulsion. By the time Stan had realised that it was only Kenny, it had already pretty much spoilt the mood. He led his girlfriend back inside and intercepted Cartman at the door.

"Dude, I wouldn't," he warned, nodding back towards the yard, "Kenny's, like, splattered all over the patio. Fucking lost me my wood, man."

Cartman stared over Stan's shoulder and wrinkled his nose in an expression of distaste.

"Lame," he pronounced as he retreated with Stan back into the throb of the party.

Kyle stood in the kitchen and watched this exchange through hazy eyes. His mouth was dry from more than just the alcohol thumping in his veins. Kenny being dead was really kind of unfortunate right now, because Kenny had just told Kyle that he loved him an hour before. Still though, Kyle's predominant feeling at that point was mild irritation because he had been too drunk and disorientated to feel much else. Kenny dying was an inconvenience, never a tragedy.

But then Christmas came and went and Kenny was still dead. Murmurs of confusion began to trickle through the school and by the end of January people weren't sure how to react anymore.

Eventually Stan went to check the body and came back with pink-rimmed eyes as if he'd been retching, saying,

"It's just bones there, dude. Seriously. Just _bones_."

A week later and even those were gone, as if they had melted into dust. The four, no, the_ three_ of them gathered at Kyle's to talk about what to do next.

"Is he dead?" Kyle asked, voice creaking with panic, "I mean, _dead _dead?"

"Looks that way," Cartman muttered, unusually gruff and subdued. Kyle could barely stifle the awful gargled noise that was attempting to explode from his throat and Stan laid a comforting arm across his shoulders.

"Should we speak to his parents?" Stan asked quietly, looking from Cartman to Kyle, "I mean, if he's actually...you know. We should have a funeral or..."

"Funeral?" Kyle gasped, staring at Stan in horror and clenching his fingers into scruffy unwashed curls, because that was just too much. "Jesus Christ, dude..."

That was when Cartman had stood up, his chair shrieking across the kitchen tiles.

"Goddamnit, I hate you guys," he hissed and marched from the house without a second glance at either of them.

Kenny's parents did want a funeral. It had been too long, they said. Nine months and counting was the longest death yet and now they didn't even have a body to go with their grief. The ceremony - God,could you even _call _it that? – was a humble, awkward affair. People shuffled their feet and looked everywhere but at the stricken parents who were huddled together in the icy air, choking unashamedly on their tears. The husky noises of their sobs were piercing in the silence. Kyle clung to Stan like a shadow, unable to stand alone while they watched the empty casket descend into the earth. Wendy was sniffling girlishly into a tissue, her gloved fingers laced with Stan's. Cartman was all the way on the other side of the grave with his fists buried in his pockets. He scowled and avoided looking anybody in the face, because apparently this was how Cartman dealt with grief. Kyle had long given up trying to catch his eye.

As the first scatter of ice-cold earth hit the coffin lid, Kyle reached out impulsively and grabbed Stan's hand, anything to keep himself from flying at the priest in protest, because this simply _could not be happening_ and what if Kyle was the only one who had realised that? He felt Stan's hand clench back, despite the girlfriend at Stan's side, despite half the town watching. Stan alone had known what Kyle and Kenny had been. And now they would never be anything more than a buried secret.

There was no wake. Nobody could face one. When the funeral was over they all simply drifted out of the churchyard, some in clusters of three or four, but all of them alone in their sorrow. Kyle stayed longer than anyone beside the grave. He stood and felt the tears freeze on his cheeks and swore that he would never let anything make him feel this way again. When Stan finally convinced him to leave, Kyle's movements felt sluggish and his senses seemed dulled, as if he were trying to walk underwater. Stan led him away from the place with dutiful resolve, but could not stop Kyle from seeing glimpses of Kenny in every face that they passed nor save him from the next four years of haunted dreams. Kyle huddled close, nonetheless, and as they trudged away from the cemetery, the snow silently filled in their footsteps, wiping clean the marks as if they had never been.

They were twenty-one. It was the worst day of Kyle's life.

* * *

A/N: Well. I'm apparently not bored with South Park yet! God help you. This is short because it is the prologue. Obviously. Next chapter will be business as usual.

I'm writing this because I feel that Kyle and Kenny deserve their own story after YCWIOMG. Pure K2, no complications (er...apart from the obvious Kenny-being-dead spanner in the works...). Please let me know what you think even though there isn't much to go on yet! I will always write because I love it, feedback or no feedback. But whether I post or not? Well, that's a different matter... ^_^


	2. Chapter 1

A/N: Really thank you for the positive reviews which were left for the measly little prologue of this story. It's going to be quite close to my heart, this one, so I feel a bit protective of it! I think I'm a little too involved with it, to be honest: it makes me emotional! The responses I received really have motivated me to write more, though. You guys are super awesome.

* * *

Four years later and Kyle's Harbuck's was dripping all over the back of his hand as he jogged across the street just as the crossing lights were beginning to flash. In Denver you couldn't trust a little thing like a breathing human body to be enough to dissuade a taxi from barrelling onwards towards nirvana. The liquid cooled the second it met the icy air, but Kyle still swore and shook the droplets of coffee away irritably because they were sticky and a gust of chill wind had carried his paper napkin off two blocks back. It was bad enough that he was about to turn up to this meeting late and reeking of cigarettes, his eyes blood-shot from having barely slept all night, without having coffee glue his notes to his hand as well.

The accountancy firm that had bought the rights to Kyle's soul was on the twenty-first floor of a tall, mirrored building. Each window winked in the sunlight like a clear, blue eye and reflected back the shifting shapes of the sky. It could have been beautiful if not for the thick steel girders folded across the glass like prison bars. The cavernous car park at the roots of the tower block was being resurfaced. They had set up alternative parking four blocks away, but the email about that had obviously passed Kyle by. As it was, he screeched into the office with barely enough time to throw down his coat and scrape together the relevant papers from his desk before marching off down the hall to meet his boss. The firm had been making cutbacks lately due to the credit crunch and Kyle did not want a missed memo about parking to be the reason that he was forced onto the dole.

Danny, the only other token gay working for the firm, caught Kyle on the way into the boss's office and clasped his shoulder with the rough solidarity of a brother in arms.

"I've just run the gauntlet myself, man. Good luck," Danny told him. He clapped his hand onto Kyle's upper arm hard enough for the blow to sting even through the fabric of Kyle's suit jacket and Kyle felt his stomach turn to lead. If Danny was in the clear and there were still cuts to be made...

Kyle didn't want to face the end of that thought. He breathed in deep, trying to suck confidence out of the very air around him and struggled to summon up a replica of Kenny's smooth grin. Then, he rapped his knuckles against the silky wood of the office door.

The boss looked up as Kyle entered and gave him the kind of false grin which would have made Cartman positively ache with pride.

"Kyle," he pronounced carefully, as if it was a word he had recently taught himself using people-who-work-for-me flashcards. "Have a seat."

* * * * * *

"You aren't fired though," Stan pressed later, his voice oozing with shameless concern.

Kyle tucked the cordless phone between his chin and his shoulder so that his hands were free to peel the cellophane covering back from the microwave lasagne. It was only semi-defrosted, because the cold swallowed the apartment whole during the day, but the microwave would surely know what to do to make things right.

"No. I just said. It's a conference," Kyle said, wrinkling his nose at the sludgy white sauce coating the surface of the lasagne.

"Well, that's good. Right? I mean...they send the people they trust on those things."

Kyle shivered and had to clench the muscles in his shoulder to keep the phone from slipping free. He always forgot how long it took for the heating to successfully chase the lingering chill out of the apartment air.

"Another firm dropped out," he told Stan, "We weren't even booked to go in the first place. We're the sloppy seconds of the accounting world."

"But they chose _you _out of the whole firm, though. Dude, come on. You're like, king of the sloppy seconds."

The clunk of the microwave door closing barely covered Kyle's sarcastic snort.

"Yeah," he said drily, "Promotion, here we come."

"Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying."

Kyle leant wearily against the kitchen counter and allowed his head to drop back against the cupboards. He closed his eyes against everything but the gentle buzz of presence on the other end of the phone line.

"Where are they sending you?" Stan asked into the silence.

"Tijuana."

"For an accounting conference? What the fuck?"

"I know. It's blatantly an excuse for the organisers to take a vacation while we sweat it out in stuffy boardrooms."

"Maybe it'll be like 'The Apprentice'?" Stan suggested with forced optimism.

"Maybe. Or maybe it fucking won't."

"Yeah," Stan conceded, "Maybe it won't."

"Yeah."

Stan clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, which he did when he was thinking hard about something. Kyle waited listlessly, watching the glow of the microwave reflect over the metal surface of his refrigerator. Eventually Stan broached the subject that Kyle knew had been coming.

"So...how long will you be out there?"

It still made Kyle's throat constrict. He eased a breath out through pursed lips to make sure that his voice would come out steady.

"Three nights," he said, "Tomorrow, the day after and the day after that."

"Are you gonna be alright with that?" Stan asked gently and Kyle had to repeat his breathing trick. Despite Stan's flourishing career and his stumbling through the first tentative steps of parenthood, he still never forgot the anniversary of Kenny's death, nor failed to conveniently be 'in the neighbourhood' and turn up at Kyle's door on that particular day.

"Yeah, dude. I'll be fine. It'll be a distraction." Kyle said, but he had to push the words out of a steadily tightening throat and his attempt at blitheness fell flat on its face.

"Seriously, Kyle-" Stan began, but Kyle had heard it all before.

"I gotta go, dude," Kyle interrupted, before he could get sucked too deep into the things he didn't want to think about. "My dinner's ready. I'm not eating cold food. I have to fly tomorrow and then go to Mexico. Fuck knows when's the next time I'll get something that I can eat without spazzing out about food poisoning."

"Okay. Well...travel safe, man."

"I will."

"Call me if- You know. If you need anything or...whatever."

"Yeah. Thanks, Stan. Gotta go now, dude. I'll see you when I'm back."

"Okay. I'll see you, then. Bye."

The lasagne continued to turn rhythmically in the microwave. Kyle kept the handset cradled beneath his chin after Stan had hung up, letting the dead bleeps of the disconnected phone line slip away from him like a broken life line running through frozen fingers.

* * * * * * *

They had all been in their final year of high school when Kenny had positively swept Kyle off his feet. Kyle was ashamed to admit that and would have gladly allowed himself to be hung, drawn and quartered on national television with Cartman commentating on the whole procedure, than say so out loud, but it was true. Kenny had well and truly wooed him.

It had probably all started with Kyle accidentally outing himself at one of Bebe's infamous 'drink til you drop' parties one evening over their last real summer vacation. Clyde had brought his blazingly gay, ballet-dancer cousin, who was visiting from New York, along for the fun. Three Long Island iced teas, a few choice words and a flash of graceful, sculpted bicep had been all that was needed before Kyle found himself making out fervently with the most beautiful real-life person he had ever seen, behind the flimsy cover of the willow tree in the yard. The rustle of the leaves did little to stifle the desperate noises which Kyle could not seem to stop himself from making, though, and in a sudden, glaring shock of moonlight the swaying branches of the tree were wrenched apart and all Kyle's carefully laid cover was blown in an instant. Cartman had let out a triumphant squawk and was puffing back in the direction of the house, shouting the news at the top of his lungs before he could even have been totally sure of what he had seen, but Kenny had just stood there; stood and stared with wide eyes, his lips parted in a limbo of indecision. Kyle had been fuelled by a righteous sense of already being on the verge of destruction so, not caring that his gaze must still have been dilated and seething with liquor-drenched lust, he had stared Kenny brazenly in the eyes, until Kenny had held up the white flags of his palms and stepped slowly back between the branches.

The first week back at school, Kyle's "gaying out in the wilderness" had been the hot topic of the lunchroom and hallways. It had made for a rough week but the gossip had soon ebbed, as gossip tends to do. Stan had been on his side at every step and beneath the fiercely protective gaze of the school's star quarterback Kyle was soon back on his popularity feet and taking the whole thing in his stride. Cartman held out longer than anybody else about it, but that was because Cartman was the world's biggest asshole. Kyle had expected no less from him.

Kenny had been curiously silent that week and had treated Kyle with an almost clinical detachment for a further two before things had changed. Very slowly, Kenny started to behave differently around him, but it was subtle. It crept up on him.

First, it was little things. Kenny would find flippant favours to do for him, like stacking Kyle's empty lunch tray on top of his own and taking them both to the cart while Kyle was still arguing with Cartman and too busy to even notice the kindness. Kenny would hold doors and carry books and stand behind him in the hallway so that he wouldn't get shoved by the crowd while he was dragging his bag out of his locker. He would catch Kyle's arm if he slipped on the ice, rest his elbow casually on Kyle's shoulder while they waited outside rooms for classes to start. Kyle accepted all of this unthinkingly. It wasn't until the end of September that Kyle really began to notice it. Or, in fact, it was around the end of September that Stan noticed it and passed the message on to Kyle.

"Dude, what's with you and Kenny?" Stan asked one evening as he and Kyle were walking home together after watching the fight on Token's flat screen. Kyle hadn't had a clue what Stan was talking about and had told him as much. His friend had offered a withering stare in return.

"Seriously? He's always touching you. Like, what is that? Come on, dude. I have a girlfriend. I know how these things go."

There was a hint of accusation in Stan's eyes which had only begun to fade when Kyle had repeatedly and vehemently pleaded ignorant. Stan had looked at him then, with complete incredulity and said, "Fuck. Kyle. Do you not even notice?"

So, after that, Kyle had looked for it, and did notice, because it was true.

* * * * * *

Tijuana was much as Kyle had expected. He and Danny had been deposited in a generic business hotel in the financial district. It was a nice place: art-deco chandelier in the lobby, big pool, well-stocked mini bars. Kyle found his room on the seventeenth floor and had just sat down on the end of the first of two double beds, wondering how the hell he was going to make it through a night alone here, when the phone rang from the desk in the corner.

Danny had joined the firm recently. He'd only been with them for about three months, having been transferred across from the Dallas office for some reason which had never clearly been spelled out to anyone, Danny included. Kyle suspected it had to do with an incident Danny had mentioned involving himself, one of the managers and a stock cupboard. Those things either went one of two ways: promotion or transfer. Danny liked to joke that they had picked the Denver office to move him to purely because Kyle worked there. They were hoping to keep the gays occupied with each other, Danny said, so that they wouldn't use their powers to corrupt anyone else.

Sure enough, they had kind of been united from day one. When Kyle had first met him, something of Kenny had drifted through Danny's warm, scratchy voice and honey-blonde hair. It had reeled Kyle in and they'd hooked up the first chance they got: at a colleague's leaving do. The likeness had evaporated as soon as they had fucked, though, and Kyle had instantly lost interest. A companionable ease had lingered on, however. Danny was the closest thing to a friend that Kyle had in the firm.

"Do you want to hit a bar?" Danny asked over the phone. "My room is totally stressing me out, man. I can't stay in here."

Kyle had agreed instantly. A taxi was soon speeding them urgently away from the slick, oppressive architecture of the business district and releasing them into the buzzing heart of La Revo. The sweaty streets heaved with tourists and every corner was draped in kitschy merchandise. Music pounded enticingly from the open doorways of the bars and night clubs, which were flanked by touts who pawed at the air and grinned wide around gleaming teeth. People wore costumes: ragged lace gowns, leering skeleton masks. The whole place jingled and jangled and glittered and flashed with artificial colour.

"Shit, man. I totally forgot," Danny shouted to Kyle above the carnivalesque noise, "It's Halloween!"

"So? Sad that you're missing the trick-or-treating back home?" Kyle replied, staring in bewilderment at the piles of marigolds crammed into every empty space.

"Dude! It's nearly All Saint's Day. The Day of the Dead. That's like, the biggest goddamn holiday this side of the border. Who the hell thought this would be a good time for a fucking conference here?"

"The Day of the Dead," Kyle echoed, the orange petals seeming to dance before his eyes. Then Danny was grabbing his hand and tugging him through the crowds to the mouth of a dimly lit side street.

"We'll find somewhere quieter. My head can't take this shit tonight," Danny told him.

Kyle allowed himself to be led away, because his head couldn't take it either. The air was cloying and thick with the sweet smell of the marigolds. It was choking him.

* * * * * *

Kenny was treating him the way that Kenny treated girls, Kyle had eventually realised. Kenny plied him with the same charming smiles, the same half-joking compliments, the same lingering touches. It was beyond unsettling. Kyle did his best to ignore it all, but that only seemed to goad Kenny into being more persistent.

It came to a head one week in October when Kenny hit the pinnacle of his flagrancy. Kyle was mid-conversation with Stan and already late for History. They'd detoured past their lockers to collect Kyle's forgotten assignment. All was as usual until Kyle had tugged open his locker door and been swallowed by a cascade of orange flowers. They had been stuffed inside his locker and now overflowed all over him, fragrant and silky-petalled.

"Holy shit, dude!" Stan had yelped, seizing Kyle's sleeve and jerking him back away from the falling blossoms as if they might be poisoned. Kyle had stared down at the drifts of long-stemmed marigolds which littered the floor and been suddenly angry because he had never asked for this.

"Did you do that?" he had snapped, tossing a perfect golden example down at Kenny's feet. They were outside the gym, where Kenny always went to smoke at the start of lunch. Kenny had simply flashed one of his easy smiles and looked at Kyle through frames of feathery blonde lashes.

"Did you like them?" he asked with a wink and Kyle had been jolted with fresh disbelief.

"I'm not a girl, dude," he spat.

"I know," Kenny grinned, "That's what I like about you."

"Right. So, I'm an easy target."

"What?"

"That's what guys like you do, isn't it? Pick off the weak and the lame? Like the poor, sexual minority friend?"

Kyle had folded his arms across his chest, hardened his gaze as much as he knew how to and Kenny's brazen front had seemed to tarnish slightly in response.

"Kyle. Man, have you met yourself?" Kenny had asked, and stepped forwards with his head cocked quizzically. "You are anything but easy. More like my greatest challenge yet."

The affectionate humour was genuine, but Kyle stood his ground nonetheless.

"Fine," he had said, "Challenge, easy ride, whatever. Still just another notch on the bedpost. Right?"

Kenny had obviously had no smart answer to that, but Kyle had only a few seconds to delight in his victory before Kenny had closed the last of the space between them, crushing the marigold underfoot as he did so. He had swept his lips confidently over Kyle's and Kyle had realised too late that the victory had not been his after all.

* * * * * *

Kyle and Danny sat in a bar at the end of the side street and drank their drinks neat, without the ice made from Mexican water.

"There are some pretty hot guys in here, man," Danny said, staring past Kyle's shoulder at the rest of the bar. Kyle shrugged and swallowed down a mouthful of tepid vodka, squeezing his eyes shut at the taste. When he opened them again, Danny was looking at him expectantly.

"What?"

"Seriously! One of the barmen is _totally_ checking you out," Danny insisted. Kyle heaved a sigh and pushed sweaty curls back off his forehead.

"Great," he replied dully. Danny's eyebrows drew together and Kyle knew his cover-up act was completely half-hearted tonight. Danny had never come straight out and asked him about it before, because there had never really been the opportunity. But Kyle sensed that his time was up tonight before Danny even said the words.

"What's your problem anyway? The last guy you were with completely fuck you up?" Danny asked, and really, answering that question never got any easier. Kyle pursed his lips and stared down into his glass to avoid Danny's eyes.

"Pretty much," he said.

"Jesus. Really? What did he do?"

Kyle downed the last of his vodka. He stood up from his chair as his empty glass hit the table. Danny stared up at him through the haze of smoke.

"He died," Kyle said shortly, and walked away before he could hear Danny's slowly whispered curse.

* * *

A/N: Just to pre-empt the questions: no, Kyle is not going to end up with Danny. Never fear. I wouldn't do that to you guys. Also, apologies for any inaccuracies. I have never been to Tijuana. I have never even been to Mexico. My experience of the place is pretty much limited to a little bit of internet research and that one episode of the OC. Here's hoping you forgive me. ^^


	3. Chapter 2

A/N: This is a lazy, boring (and overlong) chapter and I am sorry for it. There's a lot of backstory, but it does eventually get to the pivotal point of the narrative (honest it does) if you stick with it. I think that really...this was more than just a fanfic idea and I don't actually have the time to devote to it at the moment to do it justice. Which makes me sad.

* * *

From the second their eyes had met over that ballet dancer's muscular shoulder, Kenny had known that he and Kyle would be together. The sheer certainty of it had struck him numb for weeks. And, when he had eventually regained his faculties and set out to win Kyle over, Kenny found that nothing had ever felt so inevitable. It was all so easy. The two of them fitted together like puzzle pieces, side by side in their rightful places.

It was a strange relationship, though, lived out in patches. They kept it a secret which they guarded with their lives, as if breathing a word of it would cause it to skitter away as quickly as it had come. For the first six months, until Stan found out, what Kyle and Kenny had was theirs and theirs alone. They would go to school and fake themselves as they had always been: crude, independent and precocious. In class and in groups of friends it was easiest. Nobody treated them any differently there, so it came more naturally to behave as if nothing had changed. They had the same old trials and tribulations of their studies and their social world to occupy them. Sometimes, though, when they came across each other unexpectedly, in the corridor or behind the sudden swinging clang of a fire door, their eyes would catch and the click of chemistry between them would seem so audible, so tangible that Kenny felt that by rights, other people should have been able to hear it; they should have been fucking swept clear off their feet by it. When Kyle took him by surprise like that, he eclipsed the whole of the rest of Kenny's world and not acting on the instinct to slam Kyle against the wall and try to climb inside his very bones became damn near impossible to repress.

They had rushed into sex because they were both boys and both seventeen. They would slip away at lunch, whenever Stan had football practice to keep him distracted. Rushed and furtive, like spies, they would walk the two blocks to the building Kenny's brother was squatting in and fuck efficiently on the untreated floorboards because Kenny would never again trust a mattress owned by his brother. At the time, being with Kyle had seemed like a kind of Holy Grail to Kenny: sex on tap with all-round satisfaction guaranteed and no requirement to spend an hour cuddling afterwards.

"No periods and no pregnancy," Kenny gasped one lunchtime on the shaky exhale of a post-orgasmic breath, "I should have tried this years ago."

Kyle was already pulling his shirt back down over his head and running calming hands through his rioting red curls.

"Yeah. See? I always have the right idea way before the rest of you guys," Kyle replied, so beautifully casual about the whole thing that it made Kenny want to sing hallelujah. He seized Kyle's slender shoulders and plundered Kyle's already raw lips once more. It was burning and lustful as ever, but when they pulled apart there were no pesky stars of romance twinkling in Kyle's eyes; there was only a clear dilation born of too much sex. Kyle squeezed rough, masculine fingers over the muscles of Kenny's shoulder and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

"You coming back to school then, dude, or what?" he asked, and for once Kenny just wanted to go wherever Kyle did, even if that meant forcing his nicotine-throttled lungs through a whole hour of gym.

* * * * *

The lecturer stood in front of the projected PowerPoint display, grinning like an idiot.

"By the way folks, in case you were not already aware, at midnight tonight, the souls of the dead _will_ be returning to Earth again," he announced with the bright-eyed smugness of an impending joke, "And while this might seem like the ideal opportunity to finally settle all those old inheritance tax disputes which have been hounding you for months, please, ladies and gentlemen, do not forget that you _do_ have to return to your base camps tomorrow and brief your firms on what we have achieved here over these past few days. So, do try to remind yourself that spending the night chasing ghosts around the tequila bars might not, in fact, be the most productive use of your time."

A weak, appreciative chuckle ran around the tiny lecture theatre. Next to him, Danny jerked Kyle's notebook out from under Kyle's bent elbow and scribbled across the margin before thrusting the book back. Kyle glanced away from the lecturer's proud smile to read what had been written.

'Accountant humour – never gets old.' The words were printed haphazardly and Kyle couldn't help but feel little nostalgic flush as he read them. He and Stan had been the Kings of passing notes back in school. He clicked the top of his pen and wrote back briskly:

'We're accountants too. We're complicit in this shit. You realise that, right?'

Kyle nudged the notebook back to Danny who scanned Kyle's comment quickly before eloquently jotting back:

'Goddamn. I hate myself so much right now.'

A click from the front and the slide display projected half across the lecturer's face turned from blue to green.

"On that note, ladies and gentlemen," he said "If I might direct your attention to the summary sheet at the front of today's pack..."

Kyle glazed instantly. He'd glanced over the sheet the second he had sat down and had realised that, to his dismay, for the next hour he was essentially trapped in a dumbed-down version of his own dissertation. There could not be a shred of information here that Kyle had not already assessed and catalogued for himself in far superior detail than whatever this jackass had to show.

Kyle twisted his pen between his fingers and began sketching careful geometric patterns around the borders of his summary sheet in a bid to keep his mind from wandering too far.

* * * * *

Their relationship was rough and uncertain at first, but things slowly began to ease. The lust became more manageable and bit by bit they found their way. Their lives gradually twisted to accommodate one another, becoming laced together like creeping vines, until they reached the point where tugging at one would have pulled the other out at its roots.

There were lots of things that could have ruined them. The day Stan caught them together, Kenny had felt sure that it was game over for them. It had been the party of the year at Token's playboy mansion. Not only had Kenny managed to score a nice little portion of weed from his brother, Wendy and Stan had been doing a dinner-with-the-parents thing so were coming to the party later. Kenny had Kyle all to himself until then. They walked the entire way in the cold because they both intended on being too wasted later to even so much as _open_ a car door, let alone drive. When they were within a block from Token's house, Kenny tugged Kyle off the sidewalk and through the bushes, where the glare of the streetlight didn't reach and only gentle moonlight could filter through. Kyle didn't resist Kenny's insistent grip, but his eyes were narrowed and sceptical.

"Fuck off, man. It's way too cold to strip out here. There's no way I'm having sex in the snow," Kyle said tartly.

Kenny clicked his tongue irritably against his teeth and tried to banish from his mind the fresh image of Kyle's flushed and gasping body sprawled across the ice at his feet. He fumbled in his pocket for the carefully folded plastic bag, the packet of Rizlas and the fluorescent plastic lighter.

"Shut up," Kenny said, because you could talk to boyfriends that way without them PMS-ing all over you. He entrusted the weed and the lighter to Kyle before pulling the battered packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket. "I thought we could do with something to make tonight extra rockin'," Kenny grinned and began to expertly strip the paper from around a cigarette. As he was tapping delicate strands of tobacco onto a Rizla to make the joint burn better, Kyle held the bag up to the moonlight, measuring its contents.

"What about Stan?" Kyle asked, but Kenny shook his head.

"There's not enough. Just for us. For you and me, baby. Hey?"

Kyle pressed his lips together, watching as Kenny rolled the joint with swift, practised fingers.

"Hey?" Kenny repeated, looking up at Kyle and finishing the joint blind.

"Yeah," Kyle said and was rewarded with a mega-watt smile. Kenny held the joint out before Kyle's face with the edge of the rizla still protruding from the slender roll.

"Lick," Kenny commanded and Kyle did so, running the tip of his tongue delicately along the paper above Kenny's fingertips. It felt lascivious and dangerous and Kyle's eyes were on Kenny's lips as he wrapped them around one end of the joint. Kyle sparked the lighter, which waited ready in his hand, and held the tiny flame forwards. Kenny caught Kyle's hand to keep the light steady and leaned into it, his eyes locking with Kyle's across the sudden vibrant flare of red at the end of the paper. Kenny sighed his first inhale back out again slowly, while Kyle took the smouldering joint gingerly from Kenny's fingers.

"You ever had sex high, Kyle?" Kenny asked, watching the slow gush of smoke from Kyle's parted lips. Kyle shook his head.

"It's awesome. I promise," Kenny smirked. He breathed his next drag directly down Kyle's throat as he caught the redhead by the back of the neck and pressed their lips together.

The weed hit Kyle the hardest, as substances always did. Kyle had a delicate soul, Kenny thought secretly, which was vulnerable and unused to being ravaged in the way that Kenny's was. Things bled into Kyle all the more freely for it.

By the time they eventually arrived at Token's party, more by luck than design, Kyle's body had become a warm, malleable mass tucked snug beneath Kenny's arm. He was easy to guide towards the distant thump of thick bass and the promise of warmth offered by the glowing lights of Token's windows. They stumbled over the threshold of the unlocked door and through their marijuana haze to an empty room upstairs where time and space seemed to have evaporated altogether, leaving nothing but the motion of lips and hips and the taste of gasped mutual breaths.

The first Kenny knew of a drunk and barely sensible Stan bursting in on them was the back of his head connecting hard with the solid surface of what he could only presume to be a wall. Dazed and reeling from the blow and the drugs and the vice-like hand pressing suddenly against his windpipe, Kenny had only a dim understanding of what was happening. Distantly, as if behind thick cloud, he heard his two friends have a brief, screaming row which only ended when Stan was satisfied that Kyle was not being assaulted and that yes, he and Kenny had _consensually_ been doing _that_. The grip propping Kenny against the wall eased abruptly and his legs gave out from under him.

Stan was deeply apologetic for days after. He bought Kenny lunch for a whole week until the finger-shaped bruises eventually began to fade from Kenny's neck and jaw.

When Kyle went away to college at the end of that year, Kenny had once again expected it to end. He knew that he would not be going to college with the rest of his friends. Kenny was no geek, with the grades to prove it, and his parents barely had enough money to clothe him, let alone pay for a degree. Instead of posting the application form which Kyle had bullied him to complete, Kenny had thrown it, stamped and addressed, right into the trash because college was really no place for a McCormick. Kyle would go. Of course he would. He'd break free, go forth and shine and be adored, the way he always had done, leaving behind the trashy guy he had slummed it with in high school - the guy who was destined to be forgotten. Kenny was resigned to his fate and had been working under the assumption that until college was all the time that he and Kyle had together. However, when Kenny had a little too flippantly expressed as much to Kyle, the redhead had split Kenny's lip open across one agile fist and refused to speak to him for three days. On the fourth day, Kenny had eventually resorted to draping himself over the hood of Kyle's car and daring Kyle to try to drive it right through him.

They had eventually managed to have a rational conversation about it and Kyle had admitted that Kenny was right: ending it was really the only way they could go.

* * * * *

Stan called Kyle at his hotel room that night under the pretence of needing the answer to a financial question. It was a straightforward dilemma which Wendy could have solved in an instant, but Kyle played along because he didn't mind being checked up on. Hearing Stan's voice always made life feel a little bit easier.

"How's Wendy doing?" Kyle asked, once he was through explaining to Stan about the FTSE.

"She's alright," Stan said, voice hushed, "She's sleeping. She sleeps a lot right now. I mean a _lot_," Stan stressed and Kyle couldn't help but smirk.

"Sucks, dude. Have you got a good stash of mags hidden somewhere?"

"Yeah. But, I mean, it's kind of wrong, though. Don't you think?"

"What? Porn?"

"No. Jerking off to porn when your pregnant girlfriend is asleep in the next room."

"It'd probably be no worse than jerking off when your _non_-pregnant girlfriend is in the next room," Kyle smirked.

"Yeah, but I never had to when she wasn't pregnant. You know?"

"Just wait til this baby is born, man. Then you won't even have _time_ to jerk off."

"Aw, dude, come on. There's always time to jerk off."

Kyle could hear the tension in Stan's jaw running all the way down the phone line. He was coping with it well, but deep down, this baby stuff had Stan totally spooked. Kyle leant his forehead against the cool dark glass of the hotel window and dimmed his voice down to a comforting hum.

"You'll be great," he told Stan.

"I hope so."

"You will."

The gentle glow of candles flickered warm behind a line of glass-fronted buildings below. People were piling into cemeteries all over the city, arms laden with wax and marigolds, to seek the graves of lost loved ones. Kyle squinted, entranced, past the reflected shapes of his room, at the soft light beyond.

"What are you doing?" Stan's voice interrupted.

"Looking at the candles," Kyle muttered.

"You have candles? Dude, I know you're fag, but seriously. Is that necessary?"

"They're outside, dickhead. Not in here. It's the Day of the Dead."

"What?"

"Day of the Dead. It's a festival thing. They were ringing church bells everywhere earlier because that was when the souls of, um, dead children come back again. And the bells welcome them or something. I guess."

Stan was silent on the other end of the line.

"Adults come back at midnight," Kyle added, eyes fixed once more on the distant candlelight.

"Shit. Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine."

Stan only hissed a worried breath out between his teeth and Kyle turned his back on the window.

"I'm _fine, _Stan," he repeated firmly.

* * * * *

Life in South Park had always been mostly shit, but life there without Kyle, without any of the friends whom Kenny had grown up with, was fucking unbearable. It was worse than Kenny had ever imagined it could be. Kyle leaving threw Kenny's entire existence into sharper focus and stripped his world of the dreamy lens which had previously made life liveable. The tattered walls of Kenny's family home kept slowly retracting themselves into his space and cutting off his supply of oxygen at the mains. Kenny tried to spend as much time outside as possibly, freezing his ass off in a bid to feel even slightly less trapped.

He couldn't dream. He couldn't hope. He just got up every day and went to work at whatever place hadn't fired him yet for dying on the job.

When Christmas rolled around and Kyle turned up unexpectedly on Kenny's doorstep, bright from his first college semester, Kenny stared at him in shock and felt as if something holy had just torn through his chest.

"Hi," Kyle smiled with the careless ease of someone who was whole-heartedly protected from all of the evil in the world. Kenny had only been able to mouth the greeting back at him, voice lost somewhere in the depths of his throat.

Inside, in the kitchen, as much out of the cold as you could ever be in the McCormick house, Kyle turned to face him and looked him seriously in the eyes.

"So, listen," Kyle said, "I figure that monogamy is too much to expect from either of us right now, as long as we're living so far apart, but I don't think we should give up on this just yet, dude. I've really missed you."

There it was. A lifeline. Kenny didn't even know how to express what he was thinking but his eyes or his face or even his silence must have spoken for him, because Kyle fisted a hand secure in the front of Kenny's sweatshirt and pulled him close.

"I mean...I'll always come back to you," he qualified, "If you'll have me."

Kenny's bark of disbelieving laughter had been verging on hysterical.

"Have you? If I'll have you? Shit, man, I'll have you right here, right now, on this fucking table. Just watch me," Kenny said as he stepped into Kyle, nudging their hipbones together and locking their grins into a kiss.

Kenny lived through a brief flare of optimism, but that soon fizzled out and afterwards things only got worse. Kenny's life was slowly but surely wearing him down and the few snatched moments he had with Kyle simply weren't enough to sustain him. He started drinking too much, too often, and smoking more. Whenever Kyle came home to visit, Kenny would damn near devour him on sight.

But around Kyle, Kenny began to feel neurotic and inferior and not at all like himself. He could get sex right. Kenny knew that much by the way that Kyle would writhe and arch and beg. But some days Kenny thought that might be all he was good for. Kenny would hear Kyle say things to other people, like, "Time is a human construct, dude. There's no point getting all Sturm und Drang over it," and would have no idea what the hell that meant. Kyle never spoke in riddles like that when they were alone together so Kenny reached the conclusion that Kyle must have to dumb himself down just to be around him. Kenny would glance down at his own dirty fingernails and then look at Kyle, the perfect collar of Kyle's Jack Wills polo shirt tucked around Kyle's flawless creamy throat and think, 'on what planet is this ever supposed to work?'

Eventually, Kenny knew what he would do. Next time he died. He knew what he would do.

* * * * *

Kyle hadn't thought it possible, but there was no doubt that La Revo was even busier than it had been the night before. The crowds on the streets heaved with motion. The scent of marigolds and candle wax leaked between the buildings. They were jostled and pressed from all sides, caught up in the human tumult, too deep for turning back to be a viable option. Kyle had to anchor a clumsy grip to Danny's wrist to stop himself being swept away in the crush. Danny glanced down at the unexpected touch before looking back at Kyle with one eyebrow raised.

"I don't want to lose you," Kyle explained and Danny had smiled the slow smile which had fooled Kyle before, back when they had first met.

"Aww, sweet," he cooed.

When Kyle offered nothing but a cold stare in return, Danny rolled his eyes and resumed weaving his way through the crowds

"What the hell's going on?" Danny shouted over his shoulder, "Think this is where all the dead souls are at?"

The word 'no' had been on the tip of Kyle's tongue, but it had slid back down and choked him before he could give it voice. Kyle's feet froze beneath him. The whole world seemed to constrict and solidify, because past Danny, through the crowds and the starlight, a man with Kenny's face was staring straight at him.

* * * * *

On the patio beneath the balcony, bones that were broken knitted back together and ruptured veins wove whole once more between them. Tissue and muscle and organs swelled, whispering back to life. Kenny's eyes drifted open to the cloud-laden sky and he awoke with a mouth full of the familiar taste of freshly-fused flesh.

Alone in the cold, Kenny climbed to his feet and walked away, leaving nothing to be found in the morning but old bloodstains hidden beneath three feet of pristine snow.

* * *

A/N: I know this chapter is shit. I can only apologise. I am too distracted by real life things right now to really devote time to writing well! On that note, I will be out of the country (travelling – thank God, I thought I was going to _explode_ with wanderlust!) for three weeks so you won't hear from me in at least that long now.

BUT! As a parting gift: The song which totally was like, _made_, for this story is Just Jack 'The Day I Died'. It isn't released until the 17th but you can watch the video on Youtube, which is awesome and stars the super-amazing James Nesbitt. I love it because it is so British - I can sing it in my right voice! ^^

As a side note, the song for YCWIOMG was 'I Got Love' by The King Blues. It's totally my Kenny's song.


	4. Chapter 3

A/N: *sigh* I fear I have fallen out of love with South Park fic.

BUT. We will soldier on...

* * *

Kyle sat on the edge of the hotel bed with his head cradled in his hands, barely able to see for the pounding in his temples. He needed either to cry or to vomit or perhaps a little of both. Danny looked on uncertainly from where he sat on the opposite bed, clearly at a loss of what to do. He wrung his hands, shifted to make the mattress squeak, cleared his throat reflexively, while Kyle sat as still as stone.

"So," Danny began slowly, "you think you saw your dead ex-boyfriend. In Tijuana."

Kyle could not make himself look up. He didn't need to see another pair of eyes telling him he was crazy.

"I did see him," Kyle intoned, quiet and solemn as a prayer. He heard Danny breathe a sigh and then,

"Okay," Danny said, diplomatically, "Okay, but didn't you tell me that this has happened to you before?"

Danny paused there, to let the words sink in, but Kyle merely stayed silent and let them slip right through him.

"And those times weren't real. Right?" Danny prompted. Kyle lifted his head to look into Danny's face, which actually was nothing like Kenny's and how could Kyle have ever seen a resemblance?

"This was different," Kyle replied, voice hard, as though daring Danny to refute it. Unfortunately, Danny was not the firm's youngest highflyer for nothing. With Danny, dares were always on.

"How?" he asked, brazenly and Kyle could not answer that in any way that would have been at all convincing. Back in La Revo, the Kenny face had melted back into the crowd too fast for Kyle to follow it. On that fleeting glimpse alone, Kyle couldn't be certain. The only explanation which Kyle could have given, 'because my heart stopped', would not have held weight as legitimate testimony. Kyle had nothing and Danny seemed to know that he had won. He reached forwards to rest a comforting hand on Kyle's shoulder, his thumb just brushing against the column of Kyle's throat.

"It's this day, you know? It's making crazy with your faculties, man," Danny soothed, "But come on. Use your logic. I know you got that by the bucketload. Forget this Mexican crap. When people die, they die. They don't come back. You know that."

Danny's tone was gentle, but Kyle could barely keep his teeth clamped down on the bitterness he wanted to spit forth in response, because Danny simply did not understand about Kenny and how the hell was Kyle supposed to explain that shit to someone who didn't already know?

"You have to move past this," Danny cooed, his voice sliding warm and slick as honey. Kyle belated sensed the air around them stiffening with intent and when Danny's thumb suddenly stroked too soft, Kyle shrugged the hand away in one quick jerk, disguising the movement as a lunge towards the phone on the desk. He snatched the receiver and held it up, wild and ready, like a weapon.

"I need to call someone, man. You'd better go," Kyle blurted and could hear for himself the panic spiking through his own voice. Danny heard it too, so when he approached, he did so cautiously.

"Woah, there. Easy," he said, "Who are you gonna call?"

Kyle's response was automatic. Default.

"My friend St-"

"Stan?" Danny supplied swiftly, "Your friend Stan with the heavily pregnant girlfriend? You're gonna call him at," here Danny paused to check his watch, "You're gonna call him at two in the morning? Seriously?" he asked.

That made Kyle hesitate. Wendy had been struggling with the pregnancy recently. The whole thing had been unplanned, and while there had never been any question of not keeping the baby, the words 'too soon' were constantly on the tips of everybody's tongues. Wendy put on a brave face but Kyle knew, from the things that she let slip to him sometimes when Stan was not in the room, that deep down she was terrified. Wendy was terrified, she said, by no longer being able to recognise her own body, by being forced, as a result of constant bouts of nausea, to take leave from her job and idle away her days at home, waiting for Stan to finish work. It would be so easy, she said, for everything that she and Stan had to fall to pieces.

They were both terrified of failing.

Kyle pressed his lips together into a thin, indecisive line, imagining Stan and Wendy curled protectively around one another in bed so many miles away.

"Don't be crazy," Danny continued, "Okay? Look. Just put the phone down."

One of Danny's hands had found its way, unnoticed, back to Kyle's shoulder, but as he reached for the phone with the other, a gut reaction kicked Kyle suddenly to life. He shoved Danny away from him hard, his every muscle taut and resistant to the touch.

"Seriously, dude," Kyle warned, "This is not a time to capitalise. You try to and I'll probably break your jaw. Get it?"

Danny looked so taken aback by the strength of Kyle's reaction that for a moment Kyle thought that Danny might punch him in the face, because you couldn't just push a guy and expect him not to retaliate. But then, the fight seemed to drip out of Danny's muscles and he held both hands up in defeat.

"Okay, man. Okay. I'm not trying to take advantage, dude. Really. I was just trying to be a friend, you know?" Danny said. "I mean, I thought we were friends," he said, and looked so hurt and awkward that Kyle felt himself soften a little in the face of it. But he did not put down the phone.

"We are friends," Kyle assured, "We are. I just- I need to- you know," Kyle stammered, because really there was no easy way to tell Danny that he was not and would never be a part of the reality which Kyle shared with his childhood friends. "I'll see you in the morning," Kyle promised instead and felt no remorse as he watched Danny leave the room and close the door behind him.

As Kyle dialled the familiar number, his hands were shaking like crazy. Two rings, and then Wendy's voice rasping groggily down the line.

"Hello?" she choked and Kyle turned his back on the phone, the coiled wire snapping taut across his hips, as if turning away could block out his guilt at waking her.

"Hi, Wendy," Kyle said softly, apologetically, "I'm so sorry to disturb you like this."

Wendy exhaled a sleepy breath, stifled a yawn.

"Kyle?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's me. Listen, Wendy, is Stan-"

"Dude," Stan's voice cut in, in an abrupt, scratchy snatch. Kyle had to swallow down unexpected nerves, the kind which arise when something monumentally important is about to happen, like checking the list for results of that final exam, or answering the phone call about the job interview you had three days ago.

"What's up? Are you okay? Did something happen?" Stan quick-fired, husky but alert. Kyle bit at the inside of one cheek and stared fixedly at the pastel splodges of the generic garden painting framed above the hotel bed.

"I'm fine," he tried to say, but it came out barely audible and he had to repeat himself. On Stan's end of the phone Kyle heard the sound of a door closing, the static-y jump of Stan's footsteps.

"Fine? Dude, bullshit. It's the middle of the night, it's the second of November and you're on the phone to me," Stan hissed, speaking low. Kyle's teeth cut painfully into the flesh of his cheek. The impressionistic petals and cobblestones of the painting began to blur before his eyes.

"Now," Stan demanded, his voice rough like stubble. No-nonsense. "What happened?"

Kyle took a deep, steeling breath, as if to jump into icy water. He gasped,

"I saw Kenny, dude. I saw him. I know it was him," and then held his breath.

Stan was silent back at him for a long time and Kyle had to sink down into the desk chair behind him or lose half his height to the floor. In his ear, Kyle heard the thick exhale, the creak of sofa springs, which told him that Stan was sinking with him. Of course, Kyle thought gratefully, of course, because Stan was bound to understand this where nobody else could.

"Kyle," Stan sighed and sounded so sad, so inexplicably disappointed.

"What?"

"Man...listen, Kyle," Stan said, on the breath of a second sigh, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I think that maybe, you know, it's time that you spoke to someone about this."

"Other than you?" Kyle asked. Stan's painfully gentle tone had left him baffled.

"No. Like...someone professional," Stan said wearily, as though it was something he'd been thinking about a lot, something he'd long been planning to say. The words slammed into Kyle like a slap in the face.

"You mean, like a therapist?" he yelped.

"Yeah. Because, dude, what's it been now? Like, five years?"

"Four."

"Okay. Well, the point is, you have to move past this."

"What if it was really him?" Kyle bit out stubbornly, his voice rising to bounce hollowly off of the unresponsive hotel walls. There was silence on the end of the line. When Stan spoke again, his words were quiet. Pleading. Pitying.

"Dude. Kyle. Don't do that to yourself. Okay? Just don't."

Kyle felt himself go cold and hard all over.

"You don't believe me," he accused. Stan clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

"No, dude. No. It's not like that," Stan argued. "I believe you saw someone who _looked _like him, or, I dunno, imagined that you saw him, but dude. Come on. Why would he be there? If he was alive, you know? Why would he be in Mexico? Why would he see you and not come talk to you? Why...you know, _why?_"

Kyle's gaze fell on the gentle green glow of his old cell phone, plugged in and charging on the bedside table. Kyle had kept it for the past four years. His phone company wouldn't let him upgrade without changing his number, so Kyle had hung on the old one, just in case.

"Just you and me, baby. Hey?" Kyle heard Kenny's voice whisper in his head.

"Kyle?" Stan was saying down the phone, "Kyle?"

"Yeah?"

"What time is your flight tomorrow? I'll come see you when you're back. We can talk."

"Eleven," Kyle murmured, on autopilot.

"Alright. Well, get some sleep, dude. I'll come see you tomorrow," Stan said, "Okay?"

Kyle just stared at the cell phone, its green light tantalising.

"Okay?" Stan repeated, in Kyle's ear.

"Okay," Kyle echoed.

"Sleep well then, man. You know this makes sense. I'll see you tomorrow," Stan told him, "Bye, dude."

Kyle did not return the farewell. He didn't say anything. He just hung up the phone, discarding it in favour of the old cell, which beckoned him to the bedside table from across the room. Kyle tugged the cell free of its wire and opened a new text message with slow, determined fingers.

'I know it was you,' Kyle wrote, 'I know it was you.'

He sent the message, fully aware that the words would now materialise in the sent folder of this old cell, to lie there with all the other unanswered words that he had sent to Kenny since Kenny had died. Although there was no reason to believe that this message would be answered any more than the others had been, Kyle settled himself in the chair by the window, where he could peer through the chinks of the blinds at the mostly extinguished glimmer of candlelight. He sat with the cell phone clutched in one hand. And waited.

* * * * *

Bebe's parties were epic. They were the kind of parties which drew everyone home again even when they were held smack in the middle of a semester. If Bebe was throwing a party, anyone whose college was within reasonable travelling distance of South Park would dare the pilgrimage back to the hometown just for the chance to participate.

On the night Kenny died, people had returned to South Park in droves, like migrating birds, and Kyle was mercifully amongst them.

"I'm so glad you're back," Kenny breathed, clutching at Kyle tightly in a bedroom upstairs, sheltered from the seething mass of the party below them. It had been a long time since Kenny had last died and he knew that he was way overdue. His next death was just around the corner and he had not expected to get this chance to see Kyle again before the reaper struck him down.

"I told you I'd always come back for you, dude. Didn't I?" Kyle said, reaching out for Kenny's face with both hands, in an attempt to hold it steady before his drunken vision. Kenny brushed the questing fingers aside and linked them safe between his own, where they continued to flex restlessly.

"Right. And I'll always come back for you," Kenny echoed, to which Kyle gave a little snort of bemusement.

"You aren't going anywhere," he said, as if that should have been obvious, and Kenny's hands had jerked free of Kyle's before Kenny had given them permission to.

"What do you mean that, like, metaphorically or literally or," Kenny spat.

"What?"

"I fucking know where my life is heading, Kyle. Okay?" he snapped. It came out so sharp and Kenny hadn't meant it that way. But Kyle was too drunk and unwilling to acknowledge the jagged edges to Kenny's words. Later, he would not even remember them. As it was, he stared at Kenny through a haze of confusion.

"Dude. I didn't-" Kyle began, but Kenny shook his head because he didn't want to hear empty apologies.

"My point is that if I do go somewhere, I'll come back for you. Alright? I will," Kenny said, suddenly desperate for Kyle to understand.

"Fine, dude. Whatever," Kyle said mildly. Then, he smiled a slow, shamelessly wanton smile.

"Let's make out," he purred and ran ten long fingers over Kenny's ribs, nudged a knee between Kenny's thighs, leant forwards to press kisses to his jaw. But Kenny caught the hands, stepped back from the knee and left Kyle's lips parted open to nothing. The pressure gripping Kyle's fingers increased to near-painful proportions, the discomfort making Kenny's face snap into sudden clarity before Kyle's bleary eyes.

"I love you," Kenny swore.

And those words would be the only thing that Kyle would ever truly remember of that awful, messy, garbled night, other than the fact that Kenny had died and not come back again.

* * * * *

The next morning, Kyle awoke to sunlight slicing across his face from between the chinks of the blinds and the chill fingers of the air conditioner ruffling through his curls. The cell phone, still resting limp in Kyle's hand, showed nothing on its screen but the name of Kyle's network provider. The persistent knocking, which had woken Kyle in the first place, sounded again and Kyle unfolded himself from the chair to go answer it, his every cramped muscle screaming as he did so.

Kyle was not surprised to find Danny standing on the other side of his door, Danny who was clean and dressed and clutching the tall handle of his wheeled carry-on case.

"Dude. What are you," he said, glancing Kyle up and down and registering the distinct lack of luggage, the still-dark room, last night's creased clothes clinging to Kyle's body, "What are you doing? We have to leave in like, ten minutes."

Kyle leant one arm against the doorframe and heard the soft rustle of rumpled cotton as his open-cuffed shirt sleeve whispered over his skin. He stared at Danny mildly.

"I'm not coming," Kyle stated.

From the look Danny gave him in response, Kyle might as well have just announced his sudden conversion to Scientology. Every line of Danny's face was frozen in dismay.

"What?" he gulped.

Kyle sighed, shifted his restless weight from one side of the doorframe to the other.

"I can't leave," Kyle explained, with a shake of his head, "Not without checking to see if it was him."

"What about work?" Danny protested.

"You can tell them I got sick here," Kyle countered.

They stared at each other for a long time, until, sensing the futility of arguing with a desperate man, Danny's shoulders drooped reluctantly.

"Fine," he sighed, "Fine. But, listen. Before I go, at least describe this guy to me. Maybe I saw him too last night. And if I did...then you'll have something more to go on."

Kyle's fingers tightened around the old cell he still clutched in his hand. It had been the first cell Kyle had owned that had a half-decent camera in it.

"I can do better than describe him," Kyle said. He flicked through the vague, smudgey images still stored in the phone until he found his favourite picture of Kenny, in which he was smiling and bright and whole-heartedly alive. The picture showed him exactly as he was in Kyle's memories. Kyle offered the phone to Danny, who took it, stared at the screen and caught his breath.

As all the colour drained from Danny's face, something leaden stirred at the bottom of Kyle's stomach.

"What?" he asked, reaching instinctively to take the phone back before any harm could befall it, but Danny held it away from him.

"Dude," he whispered, and turned the phone around so that the screen faced Kyle. "This is the barman from our first night in La Revo. The one who stared at you the whole time we were there."

* * *

A/N: The only reason this chapter got written is because of your wonderful reviews. They are what keep me posting! A big thank you in particular to all those people without accounts who review my stories, often so wonderfully, and I have no way of contacting in person. You guys are seriously awesome.

Work is about to get seriously hectic, so I'm not sure what's going to happen with this fic now. I don't want to leave anything unfinished, but my writing time is going to get seriously limited in a few days, so updates may get slow. Just wanted to warn you...


	5. Chapter 4

A/N: Well, now this is news to me...but I completely missed Stan while I was writing this chapter. Possibly because he is a comforting character to write. I need aaaalll the comfort right now. (Too much PRESSURE!) I feel a cuddly one-shot coming on...

Also: I am currently an empty shell of a human being thanks to my job. Literally empty. This does not allow me to write well. Or often. This chapter has been cobbled together in bits and pieces and is something of an unedited patchwork quilt. This frustrates me. Grr. I want to engage with it properly.

* * *

During the day, the air in La Revo felt thick with the smell of damp concrete. Kyle had to push his way through the heat, weaving between bronzed bodies and unfamiliar road signs as he searched out his way to the bar. Danny had helped him to sketch a rough map of the area onto a piece of complimentary hotel paper. A scruffy star marked out the half-remembered destination amongst the scattering of pencilled roads.

"You won't be able to miss it," Danny had said. "We could see the blue of that nightclub sign above it from streets away."

But the neon lights did not shine in the daytime, and now the paper crumpled in Kyle's sweaty palm bore little to no resemblance to the road layout which curved around him. Kyle continued to trudge the blinding streets with sluggish but relentless steps because he was no closer to knowing his way back to the main road where he could pick up a taxi than he was from finding his way to the bar. As he wove between the crowds of tourists and bar touts, Kyle could feel a familiar splintering tension lancing through his jaw. He was clenching his teeth hard in frustration and had to make a conscious effort to relax the muscles before someone jostled him wrong and he bit his tongue in half.

Striking out wildly onto the streets in search of one person in a city with a population of over a million was perhaps not, in retrospect, the most sensible move that Kyle had ever made. But what other choice had there been? He had stood in the open door to his hotel room, stood and gaped at Danny and the screen of the phone in Danny's hand. A hotel maid had slowly trundled her cart past them down the corridor without breaking the spell. Kyle had not been able to react until the image on the phone screen had flicked off into the darkness of standby. As if Kenny's miniature, pixellated eyes had been holding his sanity temporarily hostage, Kyle could only think again when those eyes winked closed and released him.

"What?" Kyle said, in a voice that was both colder and steadier than he could have expected.

"He was the barman," Danny repeated, and turned the phone round again, pressing the screen back to life so he could get another look at the picture. "I mean. I think. It looks like him. The picture's not so clear but...yeah, I'm pretty sure it's him."

"How sure?" Kyle demanded.

"Pretty sure."

Kyle's fingers itched to snatch a fistful of Danny's shirt so that he could shake him and shake him until it became true. Danny was staring at the phone screen as if hypnotised, his brow furrowed in concentrated thought.

"I'm about as sure as I can be," Danny said finally, and only when he looked up again, eyes so certain, did Kyle finally begin to feel sick and faint and dizzy with dread, because this had the unbearable potential of being one of those moments that he might look back on in years to come as a point when his life had changed irreparably.

So, now, despite the needle-in-a-haystack pointlessness of it, Kyle was wandering a Mexican city in the height of the midday sun, searching for someone whose coffin Kyle had already seen lowered into the ground. It might have been hopeless, but Kyle kept on like a man possessed. He beat the sensible parts of his brain, which spoke in Stan's voice, into complete submission until there was nothing left but the heat of the sun and the sleepy press of narrow streets.

Sweat plastered Kyle's shirt to his back like a second skin and the soles of his feet were prickling with exertion when suddenly, just like that, an unexpected bend in the road left him looking up at the blank outline of a familiar nightclub sign, a sign which, come nightfall, would flush with power and glare bright, electric blue across the rooftops.

The bar's grimy door stuck in its frame and Kyle had to lean his full weight against it before it opened with a jerk, sending him stumbling clumsily across the threshold. Sunlight thundered in through the door around him, brass and unnatural in the dim room. A barmaid, who was stacking pint glasses behind the bar, glanced up at the intrusion. She took one look at Kyle, at his flaming red hair and sun-drenched pink cheeks, then said,

"Hello. Can I help you?"

Her English was slow and thickly accented.

"I," Kyle began, before he realised that he had no plan for what he would say next.

"I'm looking for someone," he stumbled, "He's- His name's- Well. His name's Kenny McCormick, but I don't know if that's how you'd know him."

The barmaid stared back at Kyle with a blank expression.

"He works here," Kyle elaborated, "I mean, I think he works here. We- My friend and I might have seen him here a couple of nights ago, working the bar. I'm trying to find him and I wondered if you could help me."

The barmaid was still staring as if Kyle was speaking a foreign language, which made perfect sense considering that was exactly what he was doing.

"Por favor," Kyle tried, scrambling for the fragments of high school Spanish buried somewhere deep within his brain, "Estoy, er, b-buscando..."

The bar door swung suddenly shut, the loud rattle making Kyle jump and scurry forwards a few steps further into the dingy bar, almost knocking his hip into a table as he did so. A tall, wiry man with sun-dark skin and a rough black beard blew out the final breath of a cigarette. He leant past Kyle to grind the end of it out into an ash tray atop the table and then looked up at Kyle with hooded eyes.

"Good afternoon, sir. Is there something we can help you with?"

This man's English was better. From the straight, confident set of his shoulders and the way that the barmaid had leapt suddenly back to work at the sight of him, Kyle guessed that he owned the bar. Kyle tried to swallow down the dryness in his throat. He met this man's suspicious stare head-on.

"I'm looking for a friend of mine. I think he works for you," Kyle said.

Dark eyes narrowed in response.

"He works for me. You think?" the man asked. "And what might he work as?"

"In the bar," Kyle said. He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, keeping his movements slow. The man's eyes seemed to scrutinise his every breath. Kyle pulled Kenny's picture up onto the phone's tiny screen.

"This is him," Kyle said, holding out the phone. The man did not take the phone. Instead, he seized Kyle's wrist with rough fingertips and pulled the phone, still clutched in Kyle's hand, towards him. He stared at the picture and then flicked his gaze up to Kyle's face. Kyle resisted the urge to jerk his hand back out of the man's grasp.

Eventually, he released Kyle's wrist and stepped back.

"He not here," the man said carelessly, before turning away from Kyle and striding towards the bar. His Cuban heels scraped over the wooden floorboards as he went.

"Wait," Kyle blurted, surging after him. "What do you mean 'he's not here'?"

The man flipped open a leather-bound ledger which was lying on the bar. He didn't spare Kyle a glance.

"I mean he work here," he said. "But only some nights. Not today. Not tonight."

"But he does work for you?" Kyle asked.

"Sure. But he not here now."

Kyle gasped a breath of dusty air.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry to ask so many questions," he said in a rush and gripped at the bar beside the man's arm, "but do you have any idea where he might be? Where I can find him now?"

The man shrugged bony shoulders.

"I don't know."

"No idea at all?"

"I don't know."

Kyle ran one fretful hand through his curls, but tried not to let desperation get the better of him.

"Alright," he muttered. "Alright. Thank you."

Kyle already had his hand on the handle of the bar door when the man's voice stopped him.

"Sometimes he work at Luz de la Luna on Carillo Puerto. Maybe you find him there."

* * * * * *

After Kenny's funeral, Kyle almost didn't complete his BA. He was in his final year, with just one more taught unit to finish and was already halfway through the research for his dissertation. Yet, with Kenny gone, returning to that life of sterile libraries and inadequate central heating now seemed too pointless to even consider. Kyle tried to imagine sitting at his desk by the window of his tiny university room. He tried to imagine pulling the next photocopied article towards him, arming himself with a highlighter, and really going to town, of working at it with the kind of vigour that Kyle reserved for academia alone. He tried to imagine doing this without thinking about Kenny; without missing him; without falling apart. He tried. And he could only conclude that it would be impossible.

Kyle had never had to confront how important it was to always know that Kenny was waiting at home for him. University was a strange world of temporary friendships and lost time. Kyle found himself continually frustrated by the triviality of it all and sometimes the only thing which dragged him out of bed in the morning was the knowledge that, actually, there was so much more to life. It was just waiting on the other side. Kenny had been the proof of that, because Kenny had long ago broken free of those shackles which choked the modern life out of people. It was what Kyle aspired to.

But then, of course, had come Bebe's party and the funeral and somewhere along the line, Kyle had realised that there was to be nothing more to life after all. This was all there was.

He had already phoned his supervisor and explained everything before he even told his parents that he would not be returning to complete his degree.

"Kyle, please. Be reasonable," Kyle's father had begged him, when he and Sheila had found Kyle lying on his bed in a room still full of unpacked and untouched belongings. Kyle had stared straight up at his ceiling, not reacting to the sound of his father's voice nor the dip of the mattress as his mother lowered her weight beside him.

"I know your friends are important to you, bubbe," Sheila had whispered, a little choked, as she bent over her son's unresponsive body to press a kiss to his temple, "but Kenny wouldn't have wanted you to throw your future away over this."

And Kyle had felt numb and misunderstood and had scrubbed his hands across his face in frustration, because the crushing pressure assaulting his brain and building in his chest was becoming too much to bear.

"Kenny won't care what I do. Because Kenny's dead," Kyle told the ceiling spitefully.

It was only when Kyle's parents had called in the big guns that Kyle had finally begun to see sense. Stan had been in the middle of loading up the car to make the trek back to Boulder when Kyle's parents had called him. Ignoring Stan, the way that Kyle had ignored his mother and father simply hadn't been an option. When Kyle had tried, Stan had gotten so angry that he'd thrown a textbook across Kyle's bedroom hard enough to leave a dent in the wall where it impacted. Shocked upright, Kyle had instantly found his shoulders gripped by vice-like hands as Stan had bellowed in his face,

"For Christ's sake, Kyle!"

Kyle had been stunned, a little terrified, until Stan added, much quieter and with a splintering crack in his voice, "Don't let him take you with him."

It had been enough. Just.

Afterwards, there had been a lot of talking and exchanged looks and phone calls to the university. Kyle would complete his dissertation from home, it was decided. He could drive up to use the library if he needed to, and would complete the assignments for his last unit without having to attend the seminars. Stan would be home every other weekend. The university had given Kyle an extension for his dissertation, on compassionate grounds, but he had never made use of it and just handed in a half-hearted attempt at the end of the year.

Graduation came and Kyle sat numb in his gown and speculated about how his life might have gone differently.

The training contract with the accountancy firm had been an easy option. Kyle knew that he was capable of better. But he didn't want to have to think for himself anymore.

* * * * * *

Two more bars, a nightclub and what Kyle could only suspect had actually been a strip joint later, and he was still no closer to finding Kenny. It was spectacularly frustrating. It was so clear that Kenny's spectral presence had permeated the very dust of La Revo, yet nobody could give Kyle an exact address. Kenny seemed to be everywhere, but nowhere. Every end Kyle chased was dead; every lead lead to nothing. It was as though Kenny had tricked an entire city into believing that he walked their streets, when in reality he was no more than an empty coffin lost beneath the frozen Colorado soil.

"Yeah, it's strange. Normally he's on shift tonight, but he hasn't turned up and we can't seem to get a hold of him, so," drawled the American barman who was leaning folded arms across the top of the latest bar that Kyle had tracked Kenny to. "I don't know what to tell you. I mean, if you find him, you can tell him to get his scrawny ass down here."

Kyle shook his head. By now, it was all too predictable.

"Okay," he said, resigned. "Thanks anyway."

The night air was waiting with a damp embrace as Kyle stepped out of the bar. He inhaled deep its lingering heat, fingers curling around the solid plastic of the phone in his pocket. Kyle's shoulders ached from the tension they were carrying and his eyes felt dry and dusty. It was becoming increasingly obvious that if Kenny was here, the last thing he wanted was to be found. Leaning back against the stone wall of the bar, in a shadow between pools of neon light, Kyle thought about where he would go to hail taxi and wished for a cigarette.

The smoking habit had thrust itself upon Kyle one day after he had decided not to return to university. He had been sorting through his room, to strip it of things related to Kenny, the borrowed items; old birthday gifts, and had discovered one of his own jackets, still ripe with Kenny's scent. Tucked into a pocket was a half-crushed packet of Marlboro and a crumpled convenience store receipt. Kyle had taken the packet outside, sparked a match and choked through the discomfort until it became easy. Smoking was the only thing of Kenny's which Kyle had held onto. Somehow, the toxic fumes helped him to continue breathing every day. His parents never commented on it and Stan never complained. The world had collectively decided to allow Kyle the small comfort of cigarettes.

The scrape of a lighter and the quick glow of a tiny flame caught Kyle's attention in the narrow La Revo alley. A fellow smoker was like a long-lost relative. They shared with Kyle a need which transcended all barriers of class and culture. A request from smoker to smoker for a quick fix would never be denied.

The flame winked out to be replaced with the satisfied shuffling of feet and the rough, hot smell of tobacco which leaked through the shadows to Kyle and coaxed him away from the wall, down the alley and towards its source. Kyle approached the smoker with the one Spanish phrase that he had learnt perfectly confident and ready on the tip of his tongue.

Kyle would never be exactly sure what stopped him. It might have been the set of the smoker's shoulders as he turned. It might have been the tilt of his chin at Kyle's approach. Whatever it was, something tipped Kyle off as to what was about to happen. He knew. He knew even before the figure stepped into to the flood of dim, buzzing light which was all that now stood between their two patches of shadow.

Kyle did not feel the tears welling in his eyes. He only knew that they were there when Kenny blurred suddenly out of focus in front of him and the outline of Kenny's body bled wet into the surrounding air.

Seeing him again felt nothing like Kyle had imagined it would.

* * *

A/N: I am soooo quitting my job. Writing is all I want to do, ever. The end. *weeps*

I know this was short and kind of shit, but I am working on the next chapter of The Butterfly Effect, like, literally right now as I'm uploading this. It's better. And happier. We need the happy...


End file.
